seo strategies to get your site ready for

SEO Strategies to

get Your Site Ready for

Introduction

Are you ready for Black Friday?

It’s not too late

Technical SEO for eCommerce

Event URLs

Internal search functionality

Internal linking

Page errors and stock management

Faceted navigation

Robots.txt or noindex

On-page SEO for eCommerce

Meta data

Headings and subheadings

Page copy

Deal-driven

Conclusion

About Deepcrawl

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SEO Strategies To Get Your Site

Ready For Black Friday 2021

03

Self-isolation; shielding; social distancing:

these are all phrases we use freely in the past

18 months, but would have felt alien in 2019.

You might be wondering what on earth this

has to do with Black Friday, so we’ll explain.

The shopping landscape has been altered

in a big way, and it doesn’t look like this will be

changing back any time soon. Fewer people

are visiting in-person stores than before.

And due to lower footfall, some retailers are

closing the doors of some of the properties

in their real estate portfolio.

Online shopping has suddenly become

much more important, as it’s providing

a more accessible way for people to buy

On Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the

entire run-in to the Holiday season, there is

an extra keenness for bargain buys

and boast-worthy deals, with a shopping

and family members.



As a marketer for a retailer, it pays to be

prepared. It isn’t enough to assume that if

you have an online store, people will come

and buy from you. It takes a good chunk

of preparation to get the online experience

what they’re looking for.

1

Pause now to consider how prepared you are

for Black Friday. Have you and your marketing

successful online shopping period? Or is

there more you could do - particularly in

regards to search engine optimization (SEO)?


Ready For Black Friday 2021 04

There has been continued growth in US online sales for Black Friday in previous years, and this year could be the biggest yet. If you consider that 2019 saw online sales of $7.4bn in the US when physical stores had zero Covid-19 restrictions, imagine what 2021 could hold!

https://www.nosto.com/blog/black-friday-statistics/

https://www.nosto.com/blog/black-friday-statistics/

There is no need to panic if you don’t

feel entirely ready for Black Friday and the

lead-up to Christmas.

Whether you are reading this guide in the

summer, or have stumbled upon it later in

the future, there are still some key learnings

that you can take away for use on your

eCommerce website.

In this resource, we’ll be taking you through

some of the SEO strategies that can

help to get your website ready for Black

Friday (and beyond).

Technical SEO essentials

On-page SEO essentials

Some helpful bonus tips

checked out some of our referenced sources,

you’ll be able to get your marketing strategy

trend that has become so prominent these

past two years.



Let’s start with the area that will either strike

fear into your heart or get you in the mood for

a thorough investigation: technical SEO.

Issues with technical SEO could ultimately

mean missing out on sales if your web pages

are unable to be crawled, processed, or

indexed by search engines. And not only that,

but technical issues can impact users directly

on your website too.

The good news is that there are plenty of

specialists who are more than keen to

share their technical SEO expertise, so

there are people in your network you

can rely on for support. In the meantime,

we’ve compiled some technical SEO

recommendations specific to Black Friday

that you may find helpful.

Before we start, here’s a handy tip for you:

if you work in a multi-department environ-

ment, make sure to book development time

now so your jobs are in the development

queue. It’s always a good idea to give tasks

a priority order so you can get the most

important bits done first, and worry about

the rest later.




One of the most simple mistakes made by

eCommerce stores is to get too specific with

URLs, using a new URL for each version of an

event (like /black-friday-2021). The problem

with this is that you would have to build fresh

backlinks and authority every year and hope

that search engines would find and index

your new URL.

Instead, use a single URL and refresh the

content of this page each year.

Make sure that your store’s online header

navigation is updated to include your

main Black Friday landing page ahead of

the day itself. Many people like to start their

research early, and you can countdown

to certain deals which are likely to

generate interest (and the all-important

backlinks from publications doing Black

Friday deal round-ups!).

As suggested by the Telegraph, A consistent year-round Black Friday webpage on your website will save you a space in the search engines’ indexes, meaning that you can be there when traffic begins to develop to a notable degree from August.




Event URLs

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/search-marketing/how-to-optimise-black-friday-strategy/

Internal search functionality

Marketer Luke Carthy wrote a blog post

in 2019 which highlighted some major

UK retailers that failed to get ready for

Black Friday. The issue he noted was that

eCommerce stores hadn’t set up their

internal site searches to provide extensive (or

any!) results for the phrase ‘black friday’.

After sharing some of the examples he found,

Luke rounded off by saying: “Optimising

internal search is essential for eCommerce

growth, CRO and ensuring you’ve a distinct

competitive edge.”




Luke CarthyeCommerce Growth Consultant

If your company doesn’t take part in Black

Friday, it can still make sense to have a

landing page where users can learn about

the reasons why. This may be because your

prices are always competitive, or because

you will be running sales or deals on another

date on the run-up to Christmas.

https://lukecarthy.com/blog/5-major-online-retailers-thatve-missed-huge-opportunities-this-black-friday/

https://lukecarthy.com/blog/5-major-online-retailers-thatve-missed-huge-opportunities-this-black-friday/



Aside from the internal search

functionality, you’ll want to get your internal

linking structure looking good too. Rather

than just building a Black Friday page and

a content strategy in place for your blog

(and social media channels)?

If you have the resource available, think

about how you can create helpful content

ahead of Black Friday and the holiday

option, or you can do a set of product

reviews or comparisons. Within these blog

posts, you can link to your Black Friday

landing page, and you could change them

later on to go directly to individual product

pages for the rest of the year.

As Carolyn Lyden recently shared

on her website Search Hermit, it is

important to be aware of your inventory

throughout the holiday season for the

best customer experience.

“Out of stock items are inevitable, so make

sure to establish a system so that when

that no longer exist, they’re provided with

alternate options.”

Her recommendations were to customize

404-error pages to include similar products

to the one the customer was looking for,

or potentially to have an out of stock

product to redirect to a similar product with

a pop-up that explains that the original item

is out of stock.

Carolyn LydenDirector of Search Content, Search Engine Land & SMX

https://searchhermit.com/blog/2020-holiday-seo-checklist/

If you use faceted navigation on your

they’re looking for, use Black Friday as a

reminder to audit this again. As products

get added to the website, you may end up

with many more ways (via URLs) for users

you ever imagined.

Helpful for users; not so helpful for search

engines. You’ll end up with duplicate content,

a risk of important pages not being crawled

due to the bloat of possible pathways, and

will dilute link equity if backlinks are pointing

to a host of similar pages.

Spend some time assessing your options

for the solutions that could work for your

all year round. This Moz post is a good place

to start if you’re still learning the basics.



facet selection. These URLs will typically

include parameter handling characters such

as ? or # and query strings, but may also sit

at the folder level following a forward slash.”

then look for these URLs in website crawls

followed links, as well as those with search

impressions from GSC.

Programmes & Data Manager, Code First Girls

https://moz.com/blog/large-site-seo-basics-faceted-navigation


Robots.txt or noindex

There is never a bad time to do some

basic technical auditing, and it’s worth

doing this before your web traffic is due to

peak for Black Friday and beyond.

Within this auditing, you’ll want to take a look

at your robots.txt file and make sure nothing

has ended up there that shouldn’t have. Like

a key section of the website, a Black Friday

landing page, or maybe disallowing the entire

website (it happens).

If you have had dev work on your Black Friday

landing page that hasn’t been done in a

staging environment, make sure any noindex

tags have been removed well in advance.

Something simple like this could feel crippling

if your competitors end up taking the lion’s

share of Black Friday sales and profit.



Meta data

When was the last time you did a refresh of

your product and category page meta data?

Now could be a good time to do this. You

may help your product listings to stand out

better in the SERPs if your page titles and

meta descriptions are improved from what

they currently are.




Now let’s take a look at some practical

strategies to get your on-page SEO in

place for Black Friday and the rest of the

holiday season.

In this section, you’ll find some tips that will

be helpful beyond the usual big sale events,

but it’s worth getting any related issues

addressed as soon as possible to benefit

from the expected uptick in traffic.

Alongside this, you’ll also want to pay

particular attention to your Black Friday

landing page. If you’re using an existing

landing page from previous Black Friday

shopping events, you’ll need to update your

year modifiers from 2019 to 2020. You may

also want to use any remaining pixels to

highlight specific benefits from you as an

online retailer.

Things like ‘next day delivery’ or ‘sale begins

on…’ can be good teasers, but you’ll need

to make sure you can fulfill your customer’s

expectations or you’ll end up with a bunch of

negative reviews.



requirements, look towards some of the

on-page elements that users will see

when they are scrolling through your

website. Namely, your page headings

and subheadings.

to your Black Friday landing page, and to

do this you’ll need to incorporate terms

Black Friday sales.

This is summarized nicely by The Telegraph,

who said: “Make sure that your strategy

generic, yet popular, Black Friday searches in

addition to product-focused targets.”

on the Deepcrawl

blog, “A common challenge across

eCommerce sites is making sure content is

unique and useful for customers, particularly

on product pages.”

It may not be the case for your online retail

store, but some eCommerce websites -

particularly those with many thousands of

descriptions from a manufacturer.

Because this will be seen by search engines

as duplicate content, it is worth updating

product descriptions to be unique and to

provide more helpful information. This is a

longer-term project, but you can start ahead

of Black Friday and the holiday season by

rewriting the copy for the products that are

likely to be big sellers in the sales this year.

If your competitors sell the same set of

products, read the customer reviews or

what it is that people want to know. You’ll

then naturally be able to create great content

that helps to convert into sales.Programmes and Data Manager, Code First Girls

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/search-marketing/how-to-optimise-black-friday-strategy/

https://www.deepcrawl.com/blog/best-practice/8-common-seo-issues-facing-ecommerce-sites/

https://www.deepcrawl.com/blog/best-practice/8-common-seo-issues-facing-ecommerce-sites/

Deal-driven

Taking into account the two sections

above, it’s worth considering this point:

some shoppers have no idea what they’re

looking for. Sure, some consumers

may know that they’re looking for deals on

electronics, appliances or clothing, but

others are winging it.

Some shoppers use Black Friday and other

seasonal sales to have a look at what

they could find, not what they need or are

necessarily looking for. It’s very much along

the lines of this:

⚫ “Oh wow, a rice cooker! That would be

better than cooking rice on the stove.”

⚫ “Cute purse. That color would be great

for mom’s Christmas gift.”

⚫ “Matching pajamas for the family? That’s

perfect for stocking fillers.”



They see the product and the deal first, then

they justify why they need to buy it. It’s likely

that you’ll have done this before too, and you

don’t pay much attention to it at the time.

This is why getting those generic sale/deal/

discount/offer modifiers into your on-page

elements is so important. You need to pick

up that traffic that converts someone from a

window shopper to a customer.


Now it’s up to you to get the team into action

so you can tackle Black Friday head-on

era for shopping, it is more important than

ever before to be organized ahead of the

seasonal rush.

If you are operating in a small marketing

team, or you still have co-workers on leave,

go through this post and pick out the areas

that you can take action ahead of Black

Friday, even if you can’t get to them all. It’s

worth the investment, as online sales are likely

to be at their highest ever for Black Friday

this year, and it would be a shame to miss out

Now more than ever, you will want to make

sure you are relying on the right data and

information to make decisions, so before

you get started, check out your SEO toolkit

to see if you’ve got everything covered.

17SEO Strategies To Get Your Site


Deepcrawl is the world’s #1 Technical

SEO Platform, trusted by 54% of enterprise

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is supplemented by a professional

services team made up of the world’s best

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18SEO Strategies To Get Your Site


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